As frequent readers of this blog probably know, I come out of a strong feminist background. I was incredibly lucky to work with a number of really brilliant feminist scholars when I was in undergrad, and basically anything smart about feminism or women’s studies comes from those people. Additionally, the “question of the animal” (as the academic phrasing goes) is something that I dwell on a lot. Ethical relationships between beings basically takes up 35% of all of my brain power at any given time (and has caused me to have some pretty spectacular disagreements from time to time.)

Is so-called animal “theory” at odds with affective and/or feminist political engagement? Do you see a gap between the personal and the political (or theoretical) in animal studies and, if so, how is it manifesting?

Have the insights of feminists/ecofeminists been overlooked/unacknowledged in animal studies, and if so, what is lost and what should be done to acknowledge and reclaim their insights?

The responses to these questions are all astounding, and each deserves a close reading (though I am definitely in disagreement with Traci Warkentin’s arguments about the possibility of ethics towards nonhuman animals being decoupled from a food politics that makes an effort not to eat animals.) Here is the link the the pdf file of the symposium for your perusal. I think everything going on there is smart and well-argued, and I especially look forward to the conversation that this issue and symposium should jumpstart in the feminist academic community.

Below I have included some quotations that demonstrate the kind of thinking going on in the symposium. Obviously, it isn’t all-inclusive, but there are lots of fantastic provocations going on that I think should be given their due. Also, I don’t necessarily think that the following quotations are “true” so much as that I believe they offer some really interesting points for conversation and interest to spring from.

When one eats a hamburger, one wills the death of the cow whose flesh made the burger possible. When an individual opts for a vegetarian burger, he or she recognizes that death is an undesirable means to the end of his or her culinary pleasure. Simply stated, the vegan refuses to perceive the cow as killable.- Stephanie Jenkins, “Returning the Ethical and Political to Animal Studies”

and

In one especially striking exchange over my use of Lyotard’s concept of the differend to discuss the animal as paradigmatic of the “victim” (the one who does not have the ability to register its injuries in the language of those in control), [Gubar] asked me point blank if I was suggesting that animals were “more” victimized than women. Instead of seeing the interlocking structures of oppression that writers like Carol Adams, Marjorie Spiegel, and others had already pointed out at that time—and the productive theoretical analogies that might proliferate—Gubar experienced my discussion of animals as a threat: a threat, I can only surmise, to the political position she felt her own work had staked out for women, for a particular set of feminist claims, and perhaps for a semi-institutionalized prerogative that was roughly correlated to the suffering or affliction of women. – Carrie Rohman ,”Disciplinary Becomings: Horizons of Knowledge in Animal Studies”